August 28, 2012 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced today that Denso Corp., an automotive parts manufacturer, experienced significant quality and productivity improvements on a low-power mixed-signal IC design after switching to Cadence custom/ analog and digital flows.

After deploying the Cadence Encounter RTL-to-GDSII flow on the digital portion of the design, Denso reported a 10% reduction in area and a 20% reduction in power compared to previous vendor flows. On the analog part of the design, based on the results of multiple test data, Denso achieved a 30% improvement in productivity using the Cadence Virtuoso custom/ analog flow (v6.1) and predicts the same improvement in actual designs. The result for Denso is a significant productivity and quality-of-results advantage.

"In the highly competitive automotive electronics market, reliability is a must," said Yoichi Oishi, Manager of the Electronics Device Business Unit at Denso during his recent speech at the CDNLive! Japan technical conference. "We needed to revamp our design tools so we could develop chips more efficiently without compromising on quality. After adopting the Cadence Encounter and Virtuoso flows, we achieved our goals in terms of chip quality and time-to-market."

To achieve improved power, performance and area on the digital parts of advanced-node designs, Denso used the Encounter RTL-to-GDSII flow, which includes Encounter RTL Compiler for global synthesis and the for design implementation. For the analog sections, Denso deployed Virtuoso Schematic Editor, Virtuoso Layout Suite and Virtuoso Analog Design Environment in a complete custom/ analog flow from spec-driven multi-test environment with sensitivity analysis and circuit-parameter optimization for robust, centered designs through full-custom layout.

For in-design and sign-off extraction, Denso used Cadence QRC Extraction, which is tightly integrated into the Virtuoso and Encounter flows for faster convergence. By switching QRC Extraction from another vendor's technology, Denso was able to eliminate the file interface and directly manage data from Virtuoso environment, resulting in a productivity boost and faster time-to-market.

Posted by: John Miklosz